This paper first discusses the ways in which Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech demonstrates some of the fundamental principles that should be used to teach rhetorical criticism, and then offers a microscopic, intrinsic criticism of the speech. The paper's four sections (1) review the nature of written speech texts; (2) discuss…

As the silent majority of higher education, community colleges are beginning to understand and use their political clout. These institutions comprise the fastest growing segment in higher education, now enrolling half of all freshmen and sophomores in the United States. Community colleges will continue to be the first choice of women, Blacks,…

Speech communication students and faculty at California Polytechnic State University, where the university motto is "Learn by Doing," take their skills and training beyond the classroom and reach out to diverse audiences by doing speaking. Members of the "student host" corps need to be quick, prepared and diplomatic as they…

A study assessed the effectiveness of the Pennsylvania State University (PSU) Reticence Program as a treatment for individuals with communication difficulties, such as communication apprehension, reticence, and shyness. Several standardized tests of social communication problems were used in a pretest-posttest design with a control group and two…

Some college administrators have used the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s to make program cuts that they have wanted to make all along for political or personal reasons. The mission statements of universities often are general enough to allow much interpretation and interpolation. If a statement calls for communication skills,…

Following J. Sprague's (1992) call to reevaluate instructional communication theory and practice in light of critical theory and Sprague's (1993) call for a more engaged form of discipline-specific pedagogy, this paper responds with a reevaluation of speech communication education in light of rhetorical theory. The paper argues that speech…

It is possible for any forensics organization or other body to center its activity upon public debates. Academic institutions have done so and will continue to do so on the basis that audience debates constitute an appropriate training for citizenship in a democracy and for participation in the economic world. The public debate before real…

Rhetorical studies of film and television arose more or less independently at a number of universities during the 1960s and 1970s. At Cornell University (New York), the accident of a combined speech and drama department gave rise to the study of the rhetoric of film. At the same time, other theorists were approaching film rhetoric from literature.…

As academic associations and their annual conventions have grown in size, the poster session has become a common format for presentation of scholarly work. Little is known, however, about how communication educators perceive poster sessions and their value to career advancement. Poster sessions have been criticized as poorly structured and…

Today's society is so bound by the conventions of print-based culture that it is almost impossible to recreate the spirit of the highly dynamic, ancient art form of rhetoric. Rhetoric's origins lie in the art of oral rhapsodic composing that involved a complex set of interrelated mental and linguistic patterns. Most contemporary scholars of…

A study employed computational and experimental methods to address a number of issues related to the representation and structural organization of spoken words in the mental lexicon. Using a computerized lexicon consisting of phonetic transcriptions of 20,000 words, "similarity neighborhoods" for each of the transcriptions were computed.…

A study examined whether published texts and studies being used in the speech communication classroom adequately address the needs of students when they go into the laboratory setting of forensic tournaments. Published studies in speech communication, selected textbooks used in the basic speech course, and selected studies and textbooks in…

A junior-senior level course in listening focuses on a 2- to 3-day unit on examining communication and cultural diversity. In this unit, the primary element is an activity involving student participation, and the major theme of this activity is cultural values and norms. Attribution training, a technique designed to teach persons from one culture…

Speaking activities should be stressed along with reading experiences in teaching-learning situations. It is important for learners to develop needed skills in reporting to others in a group setting. The teacher and the pupils in the classroom should support each other so that satisfying experiences in oral communication are an end result.…

The place to begin curricular change (in response to changing demography and cultural diversity) is with establishing general learning goals that the changes will be designed to address. The first criteria for any curricular decisions for a basic speech communication course should be: change must provide an opportunity for learning that is…